How to find Profitable Keywords faster with iSpionage’s KEI score

Today I’m going to share with you how to find profitable keywords faster by using iSpionage competitive keyword research.
To get started, I’m going to use an example, Godaddy.com. I’m going to type their URL into the search box here on iSpionage, and what you see here is all the competitive intelligence data we have for Godaddy.com, and today we’re interested in keywords, specifically PPC and ad word keywords. What I’m going to do is I’m going to click on the PPC keywords tab, and here you see a list of all the keywords we’ve found that GoDaddy has bid on with their ad words campaigns, so these are all the terms that they are currently bidding on or have bid on in the recent past. What we see here is that we’ve collected 46,213 keywords in Google, and 17,323 keywords for Bing and Yahoo. When you combine those two, the combined unique keywords that they’re bidding on, or have bid on is 50,800 keywords.

The great thing about iSpionage is you can use it to find the terms that your competitors are bidding on, and that short cuts your keyword research process, makes it easier for you to find terms to bid on, and also just makes it faster especially when you build out multiple campaigns like agencies or consultants do. What I want to help you with today is not only to find your competitor’s keywords and not only to download them, which you can do by clicking this export tab. When you click it you can actually download all 50,000 keywords at one time. But what I’m the most interested in showing you is how to use iSpionage’s proprietary keyword effectiveness index to figure out which terms are the most profitable terms for competitors.

What we see here is that there’s a column for a KEI score, and I mentioned before, this stands for Keyword Effectiveness Index. This is a score that’s only available on iSpionage, and what we do is we use a proprietary formula to determine which keywords are the most valuable for each individual advertiser, and then we rank them according to which ones are the most valuable. There’s a lot of green bars here, and the closer it gets to 100 the more valuable the keyword is for a particular advertiser. You may be wondering how did we come up with this score, what variables go into it. The easy answer, the short answer is that the two most important variables for it are how long a keyword has been bid on by a particular advertiser, and whether or not they are currently bidding on a particular keyword.

The thought process works like this. If GoDaddy or any advertiser has been bidding on a keyword for a long period of time, then there’s a very good chance that’s a profitable keyword for that business. Also, if they are still bidding on a particular keyword, then that means that that keyword likely is a profitable term for that business because they haven’t stopped it and they’re still bidding on it. There are some assumptions there, but when you combine those two factors and come up with this KEI score, it really does help to bring the top keywords to the top. The benefit of that is if you just download 50,000 keywords, that’s a lot for any one person to sort through, to organize, to figure out which terms are the most valuable, which terms are the best, which ones should you add to your campaign, whereas if you’re able to sort, to start your sort process/search process this way, it really helps to narrow down which ones you should pay attention to first. Again, instead of paying attention to 50,000 keywords, let’s say you can pay attention to the top 100, or the top 500 keywords for any individual advertiser.

Something else you can use, actually, is we have a narrow results feature, which you see here, and you can click on it and it allows you to sort by KEI score. So this example, I’m going to look for terms with a KEI score over 85. You can put CPC in here. I’m going to leave that blank for now. Search volume, I’m going to put in over 100, so I want terms that have a KEI score of over 85 and a search volume over 100. Let’s say the average position I want it to be higher than 4, so only terms who have an average position higher than 4. I’m going to click update and see what happens to the results, and then click out of it.

Okay, so what we see here is there are 813 terms that fit the criteria that we just specified. You can click the export tab now and just download as a CSV file these 813 top terms. But let’s say you want to narrow that even further. We could bring this up to 90, and we could maybe bring this up to a 3, so the average position of 3 or higher, and see what that does to the results. Okay, so that narrowed it to 622 terms. Again, we’re narrowing by not only the KEI score, not only other factors, but we’re also including search volume, so if it’s lower than 100 as estimated by ad words, we’re not going to worry about it and the average position for these terms is a 99.99, or all the results we’re looking at is 90 or higher. They have a search volume of 100 or higher, so we see that here, 100 or higher. These terms have an average position of 1, and that’s going to go down from 1 to about 4, or 3 … I believe we narrowed it down to 3, so down to 3.

Anyways, what you see is these are really the cream of the crop, the top 622 terms, and if you’re building out a new campaign or you’re looking to find GoDaddy’s or any other advertiser’s most profitable terms, this is a great way to do that. This gives you a great starter list. Again, you don’t have to sort through 50,000 keywords, which is a chore for anybody, and this really helps you to find profitable keywords faster, to narrow the results down to the ones that really you should pay attention to first, and then if you have more time you can always come back and you can search for more terms, and do another sort, et cetera. But what we really recommend is using this narrowed results tool to narrow the results down to the ones that are really the cream, really the most important, really the best terms for any individual advertiser, and that’s going to shortcut your keyword process and it’s going to help you to find profitable keywords faster, which is something that every advertiser wants to do.

That concludes our video for today. If you have questions, you can always email us at support@ispionage.com, and we wish you the best of luck with your campaign and hope that these features allow you to find profitable keywords faster.